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The American Prospect - articles by authorenDelusions of Charityhttp://www.prospect.org/article/delusions-charity
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<p>
<b>WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY</b><br /></p>
<ul><li>
<p>Marvin Olasky,<i> The Tragedy of American Compassion</i> <br />(Regnery Publishing, 1992).
</p><p></p></li><li> Lester M. Salamon, <i>Partners in Public Service: Government-Nonprofit Relations<br />
in the Modern Welfare State </i><br />(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
</li></ul><p>
</p><hr /><p>
<font size="+3">T</font>here is such a thing as reforming welfare, and there is such a thing as<br />
cutting spending on welfare. It is fortunate, hold the Republicans who control<br />
Congress, that the two are synonymous. The politically appealing belief that<br />
cutting welfare will improve life for the poor rests upon two long-held<br />
conservative propositions: that most of the welfare poor are jobless because<br />
they would rather eat and not work than eat and work; and that, if welfare is<br />
scaled back or eliminated, private charity will fill in at least as well as<br />
government.
</p><p>
One might notice a certain contradiction here. If the problem is that we give<br />
our poor so much that it destroys any incentive to find work, then having<br />
private charities sign the check instead of government won't help. The<br />
conservative answer, the glue that holds the two propositions together, is that<br />
charity won't merely fill government's shoes, it will do better. Private<br />
charity, welfare cutters claim, will swoop in after years of being supplanted<br />
by welfare, cut down on abuse, and apply the sort of personalized "tough love"<br />
that government bureaucrats can't provide. The only role for government is to<br />
get out of the way.
</p><p>
This is the thrust of <i>The Tragedy of American Compassion</i>, by Marvin<br />
Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor now on leave at the Progress<br />
and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank closely associated with Newt<br />
Gingrich. Originally published in 1992, the book was hastily reprinted in 1995<br />
after Gingrich endorsed it in several major speeches as the blueprint for<br />
replacing welfare. The cover now features a prominent gold star advertising<br />
that the book is "Recommended by Newt Gingrich." (Perhaps one day all books<br />
will say whether or not they are recommended by Gingrich. Films could use a<br />
similar arrangement with Bob Dole.)
</p><p>
<i>The Tragedy of American Compassion</i> turns upside down conventional<br />
notions of the history of charity and welfare. According to Olasky, our society<br />
had reached its apex of compassion well before the turn of the century. He<br />
cites, for example, the record of a seventeenth-century charitable society that<br />
"opened the bowels of our compassion"--presumably, this is intended as a<br />
positive metaphor--to a crippled widow. But this sort of aid was always denied<br />
to those who refused to work or were otherwise deemed morally unsuitable.
</p><p>
Paradoxically, the author argues, the decline began during the Progressive Era,<br />
when the middle and upper classes first became widely aroused to the plight of<br />
the urban poor. Olasky sees much good in this era but also the beginning of<br />
large-scale solutions that indiscriminately dispense aid without addressing the<br />
moral failures that, in his view, made people poor in the first place. He<br />
insists that, except during the Great Depression, poverty has nearly always<br />
been due to character flaws on the part of the poor. Handouts will only<br />
reinforce this behavior. Olasky takes this position to its reductio ad absurdum<br />
himself, approvingly citing Andrew Johnson's opposition to government programs<br />
to aid newly freed slaves after the Civil War.
</p><p>
Olasky criticizes government involvement in welfare on several grounds. First,<br />
while volunteers historically dispensed aid personally, with an eye toward its<br />
impact upon the recipient, government invariably depersonalizes the process.<br />
Second, it does not emphasize Christian religious conversion, which he calls<br />
"the key to poverty fighting." (The author complains that, when posing as<br />
homeless several years ago, he was commonly offered food but never given a<br />
Bible.) Finally, government pushes out private charity. The advent of<br />
professional social workers, he argues, has elbowed out full-time volunteers.
</p><p>
The critique is not limited to government. "Too many private charities," he<br />
complains, "dispense aid indiscriminately and thus provide, instead of points<br />
of light, alternative shades of darkness."
</p><p>
<font size="+3">E</font>ven if we are to accept Olasky's image of the golden past, he provides no good<br />
reason to suppose that those old solutions would work today. Indeed, he makes<br />
no mention whatsoever of the social and economic changes that account for most<br />
of the developments he bemoans.
</p><p>
Olasky, for example, observes that in early America "the able- bodied could<br />
readily find jobs in a growing agricultural economy." Those who didn't work<br />
were lazy, drunk, or the like. Yet he assumes that this is no less true today,<br />
even though industrialization and growth in productivity (not to mention the<br />
business cycle) make it at least unlikely that everyone will be employed all<br />
the time.
</p><p>
Likewise, the author attributes the decline in personal attention given to the<br />
poor--a trend he infers completely from anecdotal evidence--to progressive<br />
charity and welfare. Olasky quotes Alexis de Tocqueville as saying that<br />
Americans have "compassion for the sufferings of one another when they are<br />
brought together by easy and frequent intercourse." But this rarely happens<br />
anymore. Inequalities of wealth generated by the Gilded Age a hundred years ago<br />
and suburbanization after World War II have segregated Americans by<br />
economic class. Perhaps Olasky's prescription of each community taking care of<br />
its own made sense 200 years ago, but it's hardly practical to suppose that<br />
Beverly Hills and South-Central Los Angeles will each tend to their own poor.<br />
In fact, there are programs, such as VISTA and City Year, that bring the better<br />
off into close contact with the poor, but Olasky ignores them completely.
</p><p>
Even more bizarre is the author's denigration of professional social work. Very<br />
few people are available for volunteer charity work, particularly as increasing<br />
numbers of middle- and upper-class women have entered the world of work.<br />
Perhaps it's true that we give less personal attention to the poor today, but<br />
that's why we have social workers. Olasky mistakes the cure for the disease.<br /></p><hr size="1" /><center><br /><a href="/subscribe/"><img src="/tapads/mini_subscribe.gif" border="0" alt="Subscribe to The American Prospect" /></a>
<p></p></center><br /><hr size="1" /><h3>MISDIAGNOSIS</h3>
<p>
So what do we do about this decline in charity? Perhaps, for Olasky and the<br />
conservatives who have embraced his book, the first step is admitting that we<br />
really <i>don't</i> have a problem. In <i>Partners in Public Service:<br />
Government-Nonprofit Relations in the Modern Welfare State</i>, Lester M.<br />
Salamon of Johns Hopkins University notes that between 1950 and 1980 "a massive<br />
increase took place in the size and scope of America's nonprofit sector."<br />
Moreover, he finds that the expansion of the welfare state and nonprofit sector<br />
were causally related: "By the late 1970s, in fact, the private nonprofit<br />
sector had become the principle vehicle for the delivery of government-financed<br />
human services, and government had, correspondingly, become the principle<br />
source of nonprofit human service agency finance."
</p><p>
Olasky, in other words, has it backwards. Public generosity aids private<br />
generosity, and vice versa. And rather than liberating charity, the Republican<br />
welfare plan is likely to cripple it.
</p><p>
Charity has never been well suited to providing a basic safety net for the<br />
poor. Salamon classifies four basic failures of private philanthropy in this<br />
regard: It is insufficient, particularistic, paternalistic, and amateur. Olasky<br />
may consider paternalism a virtue rather than a weakness, but he fails to<br />
address the inherent weakness of vesting all control of the resources spent on<br />
the poor with the wealthier Americans who donate to private charity. Olasky is<br />
correct that this power enables private charities to emphasize religion more<br />
than welfare or government-aided charity, but it is simply inconsistent with<br />
our nation's political traditions to insist as public policy that the poor's<br />
receipt of aid be contingent upon their acceptance of religious guidance.
</p><p>
<font size="+3">O</font>nly a tiny share of charitable contributions made to nonprofits is devoted to<br />
helping the less fortunate. The rest goes to services used by the donors<br />
themselves. More than 85 percent of contributions, even to churches, are<br />
channeled into administrative and maintenance costs. Despite Olasky's faith in<br />
the power of churches to handle welfare, they rarely minister outside their<br />
congregations.
</p><p>
Is this likely to change if the welfare state is pared back? Obviously, this is<br />
a crucial question, but the Republicans have made no serious effort to predict<br />
the impact of their experiment. Conservative apologists for stripping the<br />
welfare state argue that the impulse to help the poor through welfare can be<br />
divorced from the impulse to help them through charity. The facts,<br />
unfortunately, do not cooperate with this fantasy. Communities less generous in<br />
their state and local public-sector assistance for the poor are also less<br />
generous in their charitable contributions. In Olasky's home state of Texas, to<br />
take one example, donations per employee to United Way campaigns in the late<br />
1980s were $19 in Austin, $38 in Dallas, $39 in Fort Worth, $38 in Houston, and<br />
$41 in San Antonio. In comparison, employees in Cincinnati gave $60, in<br />
Cleveland $69, and in Columbus $59. The results are similar for the national<br />
disease campaigns and fundraisers for public radio and television. The pattern<br />
holds true across the country, even taking into account poverty rates and<br />
income.</p>
<p>
Olasky's solution to the welfare problem, at least nominally, has two parts: We<br />
must stop giving money to the poor and instead grant them personal attention.<br />
But his book is not packaged as a call for right-thinking Christians to flock to<br />
this country's pockets of poverty. Certainly, this is not the message that<br />
Gingrich seems to have taken from it. Instead, it legitimatizes for the stingy<br />
a moral reason to turn their backs on the poor. It turns out, Olasky and his<br />
supporters find, that the underprivileged are better off if we keep our money.<br />
No wonder the message is so popular. </p>
<p><br /><br /><!-- dhandler for print articles --></p></div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2001 18:48:05 +0000141300 at http://www.prospect.orgJulian Wolpert